The romance options are Breden, Kalt/Kala and Simon/Suzane. There will be more in later games, depending on social class and gender.
And there’s a major climax in Chapter 4, but it’s definitely Part 1 ending on a cliffhanger.
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It kind of goes with the “big fantasy series” genre. I blame Tolkien.
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I have noticed that it is possible to make a save even if your character doesn’t survive. So is it possible that we will be able to make a new MC in the next part? From a different province, or a halassurq even?
Among other things, that would require the reworking of an entire ideological stat. Two for a Halassurq or Wiend.
Besides, we all know that while the other cultures are important, Shayard culture is the best. I mean just look at how awesome we are.
On the contrary, a unifying Koine culture overlaid on many nations is a far stronger basis for empire than a single Shayardene culture.
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Of course, it’s hard to impose a culture that has been systemically gutted and subsumed by Koine. We all know that to be cool we need to adopt Koine. Just look at how cool those words are.
I broadly agree, but why not build a new culture for that overlay instead?
Since the Hegemony’s current culture is hopelessly tied to an inhumane religion and attendant case system, not to mention corrupt, decadent and elitist.
If it was the “best” it would have won out five centuries ago, the fact that it didn’t belies your entire premise here.
In any case my mc is very much not prepared to endorse Shayardene royalism and the Laconnier puppets of Halassur.
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Since i am the Angel Eclect… i will wait for my calling and a sign from Heaven to guide me on any future decision 
You do realise my aristocrat is a cosmopolitan right?
Well as (ancient) India has proven at times during its long history some rulers and their upper classes at times being relatively cosmopolitan and (again relatively) nice to and interested in foreigners never made them seriously reconsider the caste system or being humane to their own untouchables and the situation in the Hegemony where the “untouchables” are also literal blood-cattle is even worse.
What do you want me to do about it? Do you want to go and hear my plans and then go systemically disprove why you don’t think it’ll work for you like always or will you actually give it a listen and consider that by the time I can implement them I have the ability to carry them out?
Oh, I don’t doubt your mc may succeed, as yours seems broadly similar in the views he advocates to what our resident Tiger advocated for his reforms, but he does hold a world-view that is in many significant ways fundamentally incompatible with what my mc both believes and chooses to stand for.
Much like with @P_Tigras I don’t doubt your mc’s reforms can work in the general, macro sense, I just highly doubt they’ll really work for the helots in general (at best they’ll end up sharecroppers in perpetual debt to the “company store”) and someone like my mc in particular.
My mc outright loathes the Xthonic religion and its abominable caste system, which he believes to be nothing more then self-serving bullshit cooked up by the elites to keep the masses down and ignorant. This should come as no surprise, seeing as how he comes from the blood-cattle class and caste.
As for the (Shayardene) nobles growing up as an indentured beast of burden and blood-cattle to Hector Keriatou of all people never gave it a favourable start, but what really drives him to a fundamental distrust of all of them is his erstwhile crush, Ganelon betraying him like he does, which to my mc proves he was never more than vaguely amusing helot filth at best to the guy.
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The thing is, one of my biggest things is land reform. I’m giving Helots farm land to settle and farm to encourage more settlements. I have stressed this numerous times that I plan on having the Helots do public work projects and get set hectares(?) of land to go and have the right to farm. With my government system of local mayors and town government and the like collecting revenues on behalf of the imperial government and a built in 5 year tax break to enable them to develop their lands they should have time to get into the swing of things.
To encourage merchants and the like, I’ll also give merchants tax incentives to settle in the newly created towns to set up markets and allow trading. I also plan on having at least once village school per settlement to teach people their letters, numbers, and basic arithmetic and allow higher education in the cities and larger towns.
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Our MCs aren’t really as “on the same page” as you suggested 
As I mentioned above, Alya’s pretty firmly against major land reform or elevating the helots. She’ll give them access to the courts, ensure their livelihood and end abuses such as mandatory breeding, but yeomen are enough of a problem already, she doesn’t need more of them. Village schools, likewise…what helot has time for school when they’re working from sunup to sundown? Education is for the classes who can afford the luxury and whose most-capable children can be tracked toward the syntechnia.
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The problem with your plan is that you’ll find yourself with the same issues that will face the Hegemony except even worse since you just armed and trained them in warfare. You’l have to go and constantly put down rebellions. My character is doing this solely out of pragmatism. It’s Bismarck style politics. By having her do it, they won’t listen to radicals over her. She’ll be their patron and benefactor and they are less likely to cause her headaches.
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Yeah, that’s something I discussed with the Tiger long ago already, I don’t think the return to the small Shayardene family farm of old is as feasible as you two think, since agriculture has become heavily dependent on both scale and theurgy in the interim. While your policies might benefit the wealthier upper parts of the Yeomanry and provide them a pathway to becoming the kind of land-owners and landlords only nobles can be at present the majority of the helots and probably even a minority of the current yeomen would devolve into little more than sharecroppers or day-labourers in practice.
Also even if you give them the land without education and thoroughly smashing the caste system it is going to end up like some minor initiatives in India where local landlords will just “entice” them to sell the land, mainly by getting them hopelessly into debt to the “company store” for seeds and fertiliser, but with the more successful ones they haven’t been above waiting for either a few bad harvests or sending a few thugs to trample the harvest and burn down the farm.
Again unless you abolish the caste system and thoroughly reform the police then, much like in India, those “vandals” will never be caught let alone prosecuted.
Be careful not to erode your tax-base too much. Again without abolishing the caste system seems to me like you’re mainly giving incentives to those merchants that will allow them to set up the kind of “company stores” that are going to turn them into the landlords of tomorrow.
I do think land-reforms encouraging things like co-operative farming can work, but the benefits of that policy are likely to accrue mainly to the already existing yeomen. That isn’t bad per-se as they need to be kept on-board in any winning coalition, but it is hardly going to be a panacea for most former helots.
Since I think that post-hegemony the move to even more technological, capital intensive farming is inevitable that means you’d really need to industrialise and urbanise in order to lift up the former helots with education, certainly, but since not everybody is going to become an academic, even with the caste system smashed to bits we’re going to need lots of decent, industrial factory jobs and better labour regulations then most of our nations have had right from the start.
My main dilemma is that the Hegemony already seems overpopulated with restive lower class “free” populations in the cities already who have nothing to cling to but the caste system’s comfort that at least they’re not slaves, much like the poor whites in the US South. They’re most likely going to be third part of my mc’s trifecta of really big and probably Yuuuge! problems, together with the priests and the nobles and their false religion and caste system.
This will be a game, where much like in real life there are gonna be no good answers to a lot of the questions, which will lead to our mc’s defaulting to doing what is best for their supporters in practice and since the nobles, priests and free urban lower classes are unlikely to be big supporters of my mc…
Okay your mc sounds, much, much worse than Bryce’s or the one of the Tiger.
Not really if you’re going to industrialise and I think it is inevitable to spread the industrialisation from Karagond to the provinces if you’re going to rebuild the Hegemony it will become inevitable for farmers to become educated to keep up with the latest developments in agriculture and much like in the real world agriculture as a sector will steadily begin to employ fewer and fewer workers, which means those people need to go initially into factories and later into ever more “white collar” jobs.
Fortunately to make things like the administration and police force better and more efficient vast numbers of people are going to be needed to fill out the new bureaucracy.
Keeping Shayard deliberately pastoral, backwards and constantly on the edge of famine seems to be the Laconniers and Halassurs ploy and it is not one my mc would like to get dragged into facilitating.
Thing is if you do not smash the caste system even good educations may yield helots comparatively little benefits.
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Depends on what’s driving the wheels of industry. If it’s based on techne, well and good. If it’s based on Theurgy, then what matters is what’s required to refine blood.
While I don’t inherently mind recruiting new police from the helots, what makes you think that helot police will be any better than Alastors?
Now, what might get me to change my mind is if it turns out that aetherial blood cannot be refined without the Karagond methodology or something similar, because then the obvious answer is that I’ll need to have more theurges if I’m to abandon aetherial blood. Still, there’s a cap on what we can do there - consider that even a minimal theurge needs the equivalent of a college degree (INT 2) to grasp the metaphysics, and a Theurge who’s worth anything requires a Ph.D (INT 3). There’s enough people in the Hegemony to provide a base of Theurges when they’re running a blood economy, but self-powered theurges will require new plans.
Nah. I’m certainly not going for “constantly on the edge of famine,” and neither is the Hegemony for that matter. The Hegemony have crazy food production. It’s just built on the power of blood instead of coal. That said, mass education is not needed to develop further if I’m using a magical instead of technological paradigm for advancement.
You clearly don’t know how land grants work. To sum it up, the whole middle part of the US and parts of California were built from people who were granted large acres of land to develop and build. You also clearly don’t understand how most tax collection works. The largest revenue bases aren’t tiny farm settlements, but the cities and highly developed towns. They probably won’t make me any money for a few decades, I don’t care. It’s all about giving the Helots the right to go and fuck up their own lives with the freedom I am giving them. Why will they be share croppers if it is their land. You once again are missing my point because of your warped views on the subject. If they can’t figure out how to farm the land they claim, that’s not my problem just like it wasn’t the Feds in the US. That’s their fault and they’ll learn like the settlers in the US did or die.
My tax base is developed around the people who can actually make me money. The Helot settlements by all accounts won’t. But, honestly, I wouldn’t care since when they start turning profitable it’ll be minor profits anyway.
The second is, honestly, do you really anticipate that they won’t get paid for their work? Of course many wages will be paltry because that is how it worked back then. They don’t get taxed off wages, there will be a land tax and the normal goods tax. By giving them their own swathes of land to try to work it keeps them away from Yeomen and Nobles. Of course Yeomen will want some land grants too, but they won’t mess with dirty Helots.
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The problem with your farming plan is that in the Hegemony, it is the Feds’ job to make farms work. Specifically, the population of the Hegemony is fed using Theurgic soil replenishment, which naturally favors giant plantations over family farms because it can be done in a much more systematic way. (If you take said Theurgy out, there will be mass starvation.)
Likewise, your tax comment asserts that the most valuable form of income is drachems and staters. Whether that will be true or not depends on what we learn about aetherial refinement in book 2 - a dram of blood is worth a lot more than a stater! If it’s possible to establish an ethical system of blood taxation, then I’d rather have an aristograrian economy than a civic-mercantile one - an aristograrian economy supporting a population of fat, strong, healthy helots who can donate a pint every three weeks. (Source for the latter number: RIFTS Vampire Kingdoms.) That would be more prosperous, IMO, than an economy built around mass markets.
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